Please describe any changes to your programs for the upcoming funding period, including the addition of new programs or any programs you are no longer doing. Include your rationale for any major changes to your programs here.

While the programs have more or less stayed the same, we have grouped the activities in programs more specifically this year and put more focus on the program as a whole having a bit more cohesion.

Please use the templates provided to add information about each program you are planning for the upcoming funding period.

Our vision for the future of the Estonian society is that as big as possible a part of it should be involved in the sharing of free knowledge, and that Wikimedia-related projects should become the place where most of this sharing takes place. All of our programs are designed to lead to this vision, be it by introducing open culture, free knowledge and the Wikimedia projects to more people, by improving the content available, or by working to make the Estonian legal and institutional environment more welcoming to the ideas of free open culture.

Education

Our goal with this program is to ensure that Wikimedia projects are useful for Estonian educational institutions and students, and that they also work to improve the projects in return, creating a loop that leads to ever-improving benefits to both the Estonian education system and Wikimedia. In following our central vision, we aspire to reach every level of the system, to ensure the involvement with Wikimedia and free knowledge is not limited to a one-off exercise or course for the students, but becomes a natural part of their education.

Why?

As part of our strategy, we want to work towards a future where every scientific article, research project and even university thesis written in Estonia leaves a trace in the Estonian Wikipedia, even if it’s only one sentence. The Estonian Wikipedia is especially important in this regard because the danger of English becoming the main language of academia remains strong in Estonia, and a lack of quality scientific content in the Estonian Wikipedia 1and in Estonian in general means students get used to defaulting to English content for most of their searches already before they start higher education. In this way, a good coverage of academic content on the Estonian Wikipedia would play its part in helping Estonian not to disappear as a language of science.

Additionally, we want to make sure Estonians understand the collaborative system behind Wikimedia projects; reaching them through educational institutions is the easiest way to ensure all sorts of people are aware of the projects and the system, including those who wouldn’t necessarily think about contributing without these tasks but might still enjoy it.

How?

By collaborating with educational institutions, we can ensure students are introduced to the Wikimedia projects in a deeper way than just “searching for something on Wikipedia”, that they understand they too can help improve the content for others, and that they learn how exactly to do it. Our past efforts have already led to many courses in Estonian universities including at least one exercise where students write or improve an article in the Estonian Wikipedia that is connected with their area of expertise, and we have a strong partnership with the University of Tartu. Maintaining our presence in higher education and expanding to other levels of education are our main plans for this program.

Objectives for 2019

Wikipedia work in higher education

As mentioned above, higher education is the area of education where WMEE and Wikipedia are already present and reasonably well-known, with our cooperation with the University of Tartu (the Miljon+ project) meaning there is more trust in Wikipedia than before and other universities are also willing to consider introducing Wikipedia-related work as part of the students' tasks. That said, there’s still plenty of room for growing the program, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As such, our goal for the year is to reach agreements to add Wikipedia-based work to at least 2 new universities, and to see at least 500 pages created or improved in this way during 2019.

Expansion into elementary and high schools

If we want to make sure everyone understands the true meaning of “collaborative” in collaborative projects like Wikipedia (that is, “collaborative means you can help too”) it is important that exposure to Wikimedia projects starts already before university - otherwise we risk creating the idea that Wikimedia projects are only for “very smart people with degrees” and missing on a lot of useful, interesting content. We need to find possible partners in this field, and discuss with them about the best ways to introduce Wikimedia projects to the students. We feel Wikiquote is a better fit for younger students than Wikipedia, but we plan to work with interested teachers to determine together what would be the best possible project to introduce. Our target for the year is to reach at least one pilot agreement with an elementary school or high school, leading to the introduction of a specific collaboration project (to be defined during the agreement talks).

Expansion into adult education

In recent years there has been a significant push by the Estonian government into adult education, with campaigns encouraging adults to sign up for education programs and improve their competences. We need to find possible partners in this field, and discuss with them about the best ways to introduce Wikimedia projects to the students. Our target for the year is to reach at least one pilot agreement with an adult education institution, leading to the introduction of a specific collaboration project (to be defined during the agreement talks) in 2020.

Expansion into vocational education

The last relevant part of the Estonian education system is vocational education. This includes both technical professions (mechanics, builders, cooks) and the arts (fine arts, music). Our only cooperation with institutions on this level in recent times has been a small project with the Tartu Art School, but we want to start working on changing this this year.

We will try to find partners to do the same with students of the technical professions as we currently do with university students, introducing tasks related with writing and improving Wikipedia articles connected to their field. Our target for the year is to reach at least one pilot agreement with a vocational education institution leading to at least one of their courses introducing such a task for their students in 2020, if not already in 2019.

We will also try to start projects with art schools, centering initially around works that are entering the public domain in 2019 and 2020. This not only serves our education goals mentioned above, but also the goals of the open culture program. Our target for the year is to cooperate with at least one fine arts school to create at least 25 illustrations related to the new public domain works (be it illustrations of tales, songs or even “remixes” of existing visual art pieces), and with at least one music school to create at least 5 music recordings related to the new public domain works (be it straight new recordings of newly free pieces, or remixes of one or more specific freely licensed recordings).

GLAM

Our goal with this program is to take advantage of the wealth of quality content and data owned or maintained by Estonian GLAM institutions, and make it available to the public through Wikimedia projects. In return, we will do our best to give back to the GLAM institutions both by making their collections more visible and by figuring out ways our systems can be used to help more directly.

Why?

There’s obviously a huge amount of knowledge available through GLAM institutions, produced and curated by experts in their relevant fields. By making as much of this content as possible available under free licenses in Wikimedia projects, we expect to see an increase in both the amount and the quality of the coverage of Estonian-related topics not only in Estonian projects, but also globally, as such making Estonian culture and the efforts of our GLAM institutions more visible to the world and even to our own Estonian users. Additionally, GLAM institutions can be very important allies in our efforts to improve open and free knowledge in Estonia, and forging strong partnerships is definitely in our interest.

How?

We have had contacts with GLAM institutions for a long time, and in 2018 we started two large scale cooperation programs with museums. The first involves documenting the painting collections of Estonian museums in Wikidata and (when possible) uploading high-quality images of the artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The second involves uploading images for (at least) the geological collections of the Estonian Museum of Natural History to Commons, making several thousand high quality scientific images available to the world. We plan to continue these projects, and work on finding additional partnerships that can either extend them or lead to new projects down the line once these two are mostly completed.

Objectives for 2019

Estonian painting collections

During 2019 we hope to expand our project about paintings in Estonian collections to multiple new museums (several of which already have agreements in place) and continue our cooperation with the ones already involved. While in 2018 we mostly concentrated on importing data about the artworks to Wikidata, in 2019 we plan to put more focus on uploading images of the artworks by authors in the public domain and those of living authors with whom we can reach license agreements. Our goals for the year are to add at least 1000 images to Commons (of which we expect at least 250 will be used on articles by the end of the year) and document at least 5000 new artworks in Wikidata from the collections of at least 10 museums.

Additionally, we are in talks with the museums to find a way to cooperate on the promotion and visibilization of these open resources, for example with a "choose your top 10 Estonian artworks" competition or with "help us describe what is on these artworks" data collection games. Our goal for the year is to have at least 1 such public activity in cooperation with one or more art museums, with at least 250 people interacting with it.

Estonian natural history images

We will continue the cooperation with the Estonian Museum of Natural History that started in 2018, uploading at least 1000 images from their geological collections to Commons. We expect at least 200 of these to be in use on other projects (especially Wikipedia) by the end of 2019.

Northern European virtual art exhibition

During the previous Northern European Wikimedians meeting we agreed to collaborate with other Northern European chapters to create a series of virtual art exhibitions that display how Northern European artists have shown each specific country in their art. Each chapter will find art pieces (paintings, drawings, etc.) by artists from their country that display some other Northern European country and try to get good quality images for them into Commons, so that then each chapter can create an exhibition with all the ones that depict their country. Our goal for the year is to find at least 25 images to contribute to the exhibitions. We will also help other chapters do the same during the 2019 Northern European meeting in Estonia. Our longer term goal, apart from the creation exhibition itself, is to start working on the culture gap between our countries, so we aim to see at least 10 articles about the artists and artworks we find being created or improved in other Northern European Wikipedias, and to see at least 10 articles about the artists and artworks others find being created or improved in the Estonian Wikipedia by the end of 2020.

Documenting Estonian books in Wikidata

We're expecting to start a pilot project to document Estonian books in Wikidata already in the last two months of 2018, in cooperation with the University of Tartu Press. If this pilot project is successful we will try to convince other publishers to join the project during 2019, providing us with data and, if possible, images in order to document every book being published in Estonia. Our goal is to have at least 2 book publishers cooperating with us on this by the end of 2019, with data about at least 100 books being imported.

Wiki Science Competition exhibition

We have organized a traveling exhibition of images from our Wiki Science Competition contest, which has already been exhibited in Tallinn in 2018. During 2019 it will keep traveling around the country, bringing science images closer to the people. Our goal is to showcase the exhibition at least 10 months during 2019 in at least 3 different locations. This would help expand our reach and show people who otherwise might not have come in touch with Wikimedia projects that there’s more to free culture and Wikimedia than the Wikipedia articles they might already have interacted with. At the same time, it serves as a tool to popularize and promote Estonian science and the Wiki Science Competition, which can lead to more Estonian contributions to the competition in the future.

Open culture

Our goal with this program is to promote open culture in Estonia in the form of public events, meetings, opinion pieces, and active policy formation. This encompasses awareness building and collaboration with organisations and institutions that relate to the culture and information society.

Why?

There are two separate but connected sub-goals in our promotion of open culture.

The first of them is to make as large a part of our culture as possible available to everyone, both through the Wikimedia projects specifically and by ensuring that the legal and social environment in Estonia is favorable to the growth of open culture (and open data, open technologies, open source, open government and other similar concerns). This comes straight from our strategic vision (“Everyone in Estonia should be aware of the nature of the Wikimedia projects and the principles of free culture”). It requires making people aware of the concept of open and shared culture and knowledge itself: often, even people who already collaborate on Wikipedia and other projects don’t really know (or at least understand) the principles it’s based on!

The second is to make sure that Wikimedia Eesti is recognised as an expert in these topics, so that we are invited to be part of discussions, working groups, conferences and other fora where we can work on improving the situation (or, given the current European-level discussions, at least keep it from getting worse). For this we have to active in the relevant communities and institutions and constantly work to express our stances about the different facets of open culture in our society.

How?

We need to work on two levels for this goal. On one side, we need to help the wider Estonian community understand what open culture is, what they can do with it and why it matters. In this area we have made heavy use of media appearances (for example with appearances on state TV and multiple radio channels and newspapers explaining both how Wikipedia itself works). We plan to continue doing this and also to work on more direct actions, like making the work of authors entering the public domain more available to the community. On the other side, we need to use our experience in the field to get into the public discourse at a higher level, trying to have an influence on political and legal decisions that might either strengthen or endanger open culture. This we have done through the media, but also in collaboration with cultural institutions and information society organisations like Open Knowledge, Internet Society, the Free Software Foundation, UNESCO, the Open Government Partnership and their relevant local branches, and sometimes by directly getting in touch with politicians and parties and presenting our concerns or suggestions to them.

Objectives for 2019

Work on Estonian public domain

While working on promoting an environment that is more friendly to open culture, it’s also important to make people realize what they already can do. By showing people content in the public domain and all the different options in which they can interact with it, we can both promote Estonian culture and increase their interest on the sort of possibilities a more open approach to culture can facilitate even for works that are not yet on the public domain. As a first step towards this, we plan to celebrate Public Domain Day already on January 1st 2019 by uploading texts by Juhan Jaik (which will be entering the public domain) to Wikisource. We will also try to work with the Estonian Public Broadcasting to obtain free recordings of works by Aleksander Läte (also entering the public domain) in order to upload them to Commons.

During 2019 we plan to expand on this by cooperating with the National Library of Estonia to create a website introducing the concept of public domain to the general public, including promoting a collection of Estonian works in the public domain that can be downloaded and used by anyone. While Estonian libraries have for example worked on creating e-books of Estonian works in the public domain in the past, a clear hub for free Estonian culture could be a very useful resource for both the public and our work in free culture popularization. The files should still be stored and served from Wikimedia projects, so the website would serve as a user-friendly introduction to what is available for them to use (while also serving as a way to introduce them to Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia). We plan to open this website on January 1st 2020 (when works by Raimond Valgre, one of the most popular songwriters in Estonian culture, will enter the public domain). We expect this Valgre milestone to be a great example for the general public on the idea of the public domain, why it is important and why it needs to be defended and promoted, hopefully leading to a surge of interest in the topic. As we mentioned in the Education section, we also plan to cooperate with arts schools in order to both introduce this project to more people and create more content that can be made available through it.

Our goal here is for the website to be ready to be published by the end of 2019, and for at least 40 pieces of new content by creators entering the public domain in 2020 or based on their work to be ready for publication on Wikimedia projects on January 1st. Additionally, we expect at least 40 pieces of Estonian content already in the public domain will be uploaded during 2019 (without counting the artworks already mentioned in the GLAM section), and the project to be covered in the media at least 2 times (although we expect most if not all of the coverage will appear early in 2020).

Guides for content usage

As important as knowing that open content is available is knowing what you can and can not do with it, and how to use it. In Estonian media (and even in material by Estonian GLAMs) it isn’t uncommon to see, for example, Commons images being used without any attribution, or with an attribution such as “photo: Wikipedia”. In the past, we’ve gotten in touch with the appropriate organizations each time to explain to them how their attribution was incorrect, and how to fix it. In 2019 we plan to put together a set of clear Estonian-language guides on how Wikimedia content can be used and how it should be attributed. These will be sent to Estonian media upon completion, and will also be useful for members of the general public who need to understand if and how they can use some content for personal or academic usage. We expect to see at least a 50% reduction in the number of times we need to actively get in touch with media and other large organizations about this topic, meaning we should need to get in touch with national media about misattribution issues at most once every two months.

Meetings with stakeholders

2018 has seen Wikimedia Eesti get a lot of public attention in the policymaking field, especially in connection with the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. This has led to contacts with political parties and other policymakers who are interested in our position while preparing their policy proposals. We want to increase the understanding of the importance of the public domain and free licenses among the people with power to take decisions affecting them, and to defend the rights enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which have been weakened by the reforms currently being worked on in Europe. To do this, we will continue cooperating with a variety of stakeholders and policymakers to promote open culture in Estonia and beyond. Our goal for the year is to have our position heard in at least 5 meetings or consultations with representatives of stakeholders or policymakers at the Estonian level, and at least 1 international policymaking meeting. While in politics and policy it is hard to guarantee being heard will lead to a more concrete achievement, we need to ensure our position is at least on the table and being considered if we want to have any chance of making a difference.

Estonian support for FKAGEU

The European Wikimedia chapters have jointly decided to support the work of FKAGEU, and Wikimedia Eesti will also contribute to this. We will offer our time (being available for timely exchange of information, consultations, and local-level support activities) and some funding, and in return we expect to get good access to information that could impact our general and public activities on the local level. The funding for this will be obtained from supporters other than the WMF: our goal here is to raise at least 500€ from Estonian tech companies to support the activities of FKAGEU, at the same time increasing the awareness of the project and of European policy in Estonia.

Community and outreach

Our goal with this program is to improve the experience of existing users (both technically and socially), and to attract new users and make it easier for them to start contributing.

Why?

While the Estonian Wiki community is one of the most active in the world per capita, the size of the country still makes it fairly small. As such, we need to ensure that the contributors we already have are happy and that we can attract new contributors who understand the system, want to be part of it and will help us improve the content.

How?

We have worked to create a stable schedule for community meetings every month in both Tallinn and Tartu, which allows new and existing users to meet, work together and help each other. Additionally, we have been organizing competitions and other semi-directed activities, so that users who want to contribute can get ideas on what to do and get additional motivation from small prizes; in a similar way, we also reward our best contributors. We plan to continue doing these things, since they have been helpful; additionally, we plan to try to make life easier for new contributors. This is especially important because as part of our education program hundreds of new users get started with the Wikimedia projects every year - the more comfortable they find their first steps in the community, the more likely they’ll decide to stay around to help.

In addition to the education program, other efforts are needed to introduce new people to the Wikimedia ecosystem, both as contributors and as volunteers.

Objectives for 2019

Ease of use

With our education project bringing new contributors to Wikipedia every semester, we need to ensure they are getting enough support, so that the Wikimedia work is not seen as a difficulty but an opportunity. We will go through help pages and ensure they are up to date and that there is a clear start to finish guide for a new contributor wanting to write their first ever Wikipedia article. We will also create introductory videos in Estonian for people new to the projects, explaining how to do their first edits. While we don’t have the resources to carry out a proper representative analysis of the usefulness of the created content at the moment, we will make sure to introduce users to the videos and ask for at least informal feedback to evaluate whether they’re fulfilling their purpose.

We will continue organizing our monthly community meetings in Tartu and Tallinn, and will also try to promote them to students and other new users as a good place to get help with writing their first articles directly from more experienced contributors. Our goal is to get at least 10 new contributors to attend a community meeting during 2019 and work on their first article there. We will also work on expanding our network from the large cities of Tartu and Tallinn to smaller municipalities by creating small local wikiclubs. The goal here is to get at least 2 new local wikiclubs started in 2019 and set the framework for how wikiclubs should work.

We will work on converting some widely-used infoboxes in the Estonian Wikipedia to use Wikidata, to reduce the amount of data-entering needed for our contributors and ensure even a basic new article can make use of the data already available to us on Wikidata. Our goal is to convert at least 5 infoboxes during 2019.

EV101 article writing project

The 2018 EV100 project, where 100 notable public figures and scientists helped to write articles as a gift for the 100th birthday of the Republic of Estonia, was a success, inspiring a total of 177 people (also including community members, students and others) to participate. As such, we plan to bring it back (as EV101) for the 101th birthday of the country, where we expect to get at least 200 participants (at least 101 of them new) writing at least 200 articles.

Writing competitions

Competitions are a good way to direct the efforts of existing contributors towards important knowledge that is missing, while also serving as a good entry point for new users. At the same time, in 2018 the amount of competitions led to some of them clashing with each other and made it more difficult to promote them. As such, we’re planning to consolidate some of our national-level article-writing competitions under the “Digihariduse konkurss” umbrella. This biannual competition is organized in cooperation with the University of Tartu and the private sector, with different companies and organizations offering prizes for the best articles in their area of expertise. We we will work on getting more organizations on board to try to turn the “Digihariduse konkurss” into a more significant event that will be easier to promote and provide a bigger incentive for new users to give Wikipedia editing a go. We will also take part in the international CEE Spring writing competition, and will still hold smaller writing competitions when appropriate, making sure not to overload the calendar.

We also expect the University of Tartu to continue organizing their already traditional competition to improve the writing and style in existing Wikipedia articles.

Our goal for this year is to reach agreements with 5 new sponsors for the “Digihariduse konkurss”, and more generally to get at least 100 participants in writing competitions to create or improve at least 200 articles.

Image competitions

Photography competitions get a different group of people involved, who still want to contribute but don’t necessarily want to write articles. Additionally, the images that are created during these competitions are also easier to directly reuse outside of Estonia. We’re planning to (once more) hold a nature photography competition (in cooperation with the Eesti Loodus magazine) at the national level.

We will also organize a rephotography competition of cultural monuments (in cooperation with Ajapaik and the National Heritage Board of Estonia) which is planned to involve participants from other Nordic countries and will include some public walks (“expeditions”) in different cities in Estonia to talk about local history and take (re)photos, trying to involve the locals who are interested in the history of their cities so that they will collaborate with Wikimedia projects. This was originally planned for 2018, but delays in the development of the Ajapaik application led to a postponement - now Wikimedia Suomi is also involved in ensuring Ajapaik development continues and we expect everything to be ready on time. Our goal is to organize at least 3 public walks in different cities and get at least 500 new images out of the project.

The international Science Photo Competition will be organized again in November 2019. While in 2017 our focus was on building the infrastructure for the competition, in 2019 we can focus on promotion and expansion. Since the last time it saw over 2200 participants and 10,000+ submissions, we're hoping to include even more international partners this time and push the number of participants over 5000, leading to at least 20,000+ new files being added to Wikimedia Commons.

National Heritage photo expeditions

We will organize photo expeditions during the summer to help the community discover National Heritage objects (and make sure they're well documented in Commons). We have a long-term goal to document all our heritage locations in both Wikidata and Commons (as much the lack of freedom of panorama allows), and these photo expeditions are a good opportunity to get community members interested in the project while they also interact with each other. Our goal for the year is to organize at least 2 of these expeditions, with at least 3 attendees on both of them, leading to 400 new images.

Northern European international cooperation

Recent cooperation between different Northern European chapters has been very fruitful and last year saw the first regional meeting for our organizations in Stockholm. In 2019 we will organize the second edition of this meeting in Estonia, to ensure this cooperation continues to thrive. Our goal is to host around 30 representatives of Northern European chapters (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway and Sweden, with invitations extended to Icelandic and Lithuanian Wikimedians as well), for at least 3 cooperation projects between the Wikimedia organizations in Northern Europe to start or be expanded/continued as a result of the meeting, and for at least 3 national-level projects to be started or improved due to the experiences of another Northern European chapter.

Please describe any changes to your staffing plan for the upcoming funding period. These should include increases in staff or contractor hours, new staff positions, or staff positions you are removing. Include your rationale for any staffing changes here.

For each new staff or contractor position, please use the template provided to add information about each new staff or contractor you are planning for the upcoming funding period (or to describe significant increases in hours or changes in job descriptions for existing staff). You are not required to provide this information for existing staff where no changes are required.